The Hub

Mir 1.4.0 Release

Alan Griffiths (alan_g) announces the release of Mir 1.4.0. Alan advises "This release is mostly about supporting Mir based shells using Sway’s layer-shell extension protocol". The first steps are in progress to remove support for the mirclient API in favour of Wayland; but the ability to enable still exist. Alan gives a ABI summary and a Bugs fixed list.

The Planet

APT Patterns

Julian Andres Klode makes an implementation of APT patterns so it simplifies the way of finding automatically installed packages, garbage packages (Installed but not required anymore), etc. He makes a few patterns this week, and will be making more in the future. He also submits a pull request to Debian's APT package manager and provides means for user feedback.

Other Community News

Xfce 4.14 released

The Xfce development team announces the long awaited release of the Xfce desktop 4.14. This cycle sees all core component ports to GTK3 and GDBus, as well most Most components also have GObject Introspection support. The user experience got some polish with new features added; The release features many improvements and bug fixes. Highlights, the changelog, and many links for additional information of the release are provided.

In the Blogosphere

AMD Ryzen 3000 Series Playing Nicely With Latest Linux Distros Following BIOS Updates

Michael Larabel reports that vendors are pushing out the bios updates affecting the AMD Ryzen 3000 Series motherboards ability to boot. Michael affirms that the update "allows Ubuntu 19.04 and other newer Linux distributions to now boot gracefully on the new AMD Zen 2 desktops”.

Michael Larabel reports on this latest driver optimizations for Intel Gallium drivers that applies to the "Gen 9" graphics hardware. Credit is given to Francisco Jerez for the patches and testing that yield significant boosts in performance. The metrics for various chip sets are provided and Francisco is open to feedback from performance testing. These patches will make it into the Mesa 19.2 release (Ubuntu 19.10).

Linux Finally Has A Fix For Crackling Audio Input On Recent AMD Systems

After two years, Michael Larabel finally reports that Linux 5.3 has a fix for crackling sound input, and will be backported to older Linux versions. The fix is made from Takashi Iwai's workaround. It affects motherboards that contain the recent AMD chipsets (e.g. X370/X470) and Realtek sound chipsets.

Michael Larabel reports of the 435 Linux driver, noting improved PRIME/multi-GPU support slated for the xorg-server 1.21 release. However, "NVIDIA is providing an Ubuntu PPA with a patched X.Org Server build" that requires some tweaking to fit. Additionally is support for Turing notebook GPUs with a variety of bug fixes. A link is provided to NVIDIA DevTalk for more details.

Marius Nestor writes that Canonical have released major linux kernel updates for all supported architectures of Ubuntu. Users of Ubuntu 19.04, Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, Ubuntu 16.04 LTS and Ubuntu 14.04 ESM should upgrade to receive fixes for more than thirty security vulnerabilities. Marius provides specifics of selected patch fixes, all users of supported Ubuntu are encouraged to update.

Marius Nestor reports on this the sixth maintenance update to LibreOffice 6.2. With the latest security patches and back-ported fixes, the release is recommended for users in production environments. All users are urged to update immediately. A link to the software portal is provided that also contains the 6.3 suite series that is not recommended for deployment.

Featured Audio and Video

Ubuntu Security Podcast: Episode 42

"This week we have a special interview with Ubuntu Security Team member Jamie Strandboge, talking about security aspects of the Snap packaging system, as well as the usual roundup of security fixes from the past week."

Ubuntu Podcast from the UK LoCo: S12E19 – Starglider

"This week we’ve been fixing floors and playing with the new portal HTML element. We round up the Ubuntu community news including the release of 18.04.3 with a new hardware enablement stack, better desktop integration for Livepatch and improvements in accessing the latest Nvidia drivers. We also have our favourite picks from the general tech news."

Glossary of Terms

Get Involved

The Ubuntu community consists of individuals and teams, working on different aspects of the distribution, giving advice and technical support, and helping to promote Ubuntu to a wider audience. No contribution is too small, and anyone can help. It's your chance to get in on all the community fun associated with developing and promoting Ubuntu. More on this at: https://community.ubuntu.com/contribute/